Named one of 2009's Best New Latino Authors by LatinoStories.com, Joy has a debut novel, Hell or High Water, forthcoming from St. Martin's/Thomas Dunne in July 2012. Set in post-Katrina New Orleans, Hell or High Water features a young Cuban American reporter tracking the registered sex offenders who disappeared during the hurrican evacuation.
Joy's second memoir, Island of Bones, a collection of creative nonfiction and personal essays, will appear in September 2012 from the University of Nebraska Press, along with a new paperback edition of The Truth Book, introduced by Dorothy Allison.
Joy is also editing a collection of essays by various writers on the ethical dillemas of writing about family, Family Trouble: Memoirists on the Rewards and Hazards of Revealing Family, and revising a scholarly book about the American Jazz-Age writer Margery Latimer, a contemporary of Hemingway and Fitzgerald and an early feminist innovator who died in childbirth in 1932, whose work Castro discovered in graduate school while researching Latimer's husband, Harlem Renaissance writer Jean Toomer.
Castro was born in Miami in 1967 and adopted four days later by a Cuban-American family of Jehovah’s Witnesses. She grew up believing in what Witnesses call “the Truth” and going door to door, but she ran away at fourteen when the home became abusive, finally leaving the religion at fifteen. On her own from the age of sixteen, she raised her son, born when she was a college junior, while finishing school and earning her graduate degrees. Raised to believe herself Latina, she found her birthmother at twenty-six and discovered that her actual ethnic background was quite different. In The Truth Book Castro writes about religion, violence, adoption, ethnic identity, and her father’s suicide, as well as the warmth, beauty, humor, and passion for reading that sustained her.
She earned her B.A. at Trinity University and her M.A. and Ph.D. in literature at Texas A&M University. After graduate school, she worked for ten years at Wabash College, one of three remaining all-male private liberal arts colleges. In 2007, she joined the faculty at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where she is currently an associate professor with a joint appointment in English and Ethnic Studies and serves as the associate director of the Institute of Ethnic Studies. She also taught for three years in the Solstice Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing Program at Pine Manor College in Boston. She has led classes and workshops in the Macondo Writers' Workshop, the Nebraska Summer Writers Conference, and the University of Iowa MFA in Nonfiction Program.
An award-winning teacher, she has published articles on innovative strategies for the college classroom. Her published literary scholarship focuses on issues of class, gender and race in the work of experimental women writers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries such as Jean Rhys, Meridel Le Sueur, Sandra Cisneros, Naomi Shihab Nye, and Margery Latimer.
Committed to broadening the reach of higher education to communities in need, she has offered free courses to at-risk teenagers, victims of domestic violence, and survivors of sexual assault, and for several years she ran the biannual Creative Writing/Creative Teaching conference for Indiana high school and middle school teachers. She has also taught in the Clemente Course, a free program that takes a college-level, for-credit humanities curriculum to low-income adults.
Joy is finishing a collection of short stories, How Winter Began, and working on a second novel. She lives with her husband in Lincoln, Nebraska.
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